


Years, Planets, Bloodshed

by igrockspock



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Backstory, Bittersweet Ending, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Pre-Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21878458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: Amilyn and Leia’s relationship spans years, planets, peacetime, bloodshed, lives ruined and put back together again.
Relationships: Amilyn Holdo/Leia Organa
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61





	Years, Planets, Bloodshed

Amilyn Holdo had hair the color of a rainbow and nail varnish to match. Once she released a flock of birds in the Apprentice Senate’s chamber during a speech, and the debate had been canceled for the rest of the day. Leia thought she would never forgive her.

She definitely didn’t want her as a partner for the next legislative session, but neither did anyone else. While they were all shuffling away, Leia was still staring at her absurd rainbow hair. Apparently she looked friendly, because Amilyn looped an arm around her shoulders and beamed.

“Partners?” she asked.

Leia didn’t know how to refuse a smile that looked like the sun.

***

Amilyn talked more than anyone Leia had ever met, and Leia had met a lot of people. When they were apart, Amilyn didn’t let the distance keep her down. She sent enough vid messages to wipe out the memory on Leia’s pad. It wouldn’t have been a problem if Leia could’ve brought herself to delete them.

“Emperor Palpatine has a face like a flacid dick, and I’ve got no idea what happened to his teeth,” the last one said. “You’d think the leader of a galactic empire could afford a halfway decent dentist, but apparently not. Anyway, I’m sorry your dad yanked you out of the Senate chambers before he came in. I know you wanted to see him in the flesh, although I really don’t think you missed anything. He told a lot of lies, same as always. He was just closer to us this time. Oh, and Brendol Hux practically drooled on his shoes. _Disgusting._ Frankly, you were lucky not to see it.” 

Video Amilyn shook her head, and her curly hair cascaded around her face. It was green this week, and Leia definitely did not rewind the vid to watch it bounce again.

Leia smiled at the screen. Insulting the Emperor was forbidden in the palace, even in private. 

_I hope you used a secure line,_ she typed back. _If I get dragged away to Dathomir Prison tomorrow, it’s your fault._

***

Leia kissed Amilyn for the first time underneath the pasol tree in the courtyard. Half of what she said didn’t make sense, and her hair was going to fall out of her head if she kept coloring it every week, but her spine was straight and her eyes were steel. Leia never could look away, so she decided to get closer.

Their noses bumped, and Leia was pretty sure the whole thing was entirely too wet. Probably she should’ve tried to hold hands first, and she shouldn’t have tried to use her tongue. And really, if she’s going to kiss people after filching cigarras from the gardener, she ought to have a supply of breath mints on hand. But all of those things required thinking, and Amilyn short circuited Leia’s brain. That was terrifying, and Leia loved it.

When she finally worked up the courage to look up, Amilyn’s eyes were dancing. 

“Let’s do that again,” she said. “And if you’re going to steal cigarras, next time you’d better share.”

***

They probably could’ve gone on forever, plotting against Brendol Hux in the Junior Senate and stealing kisses in the courtyard, if not for the day Bail Organa was almost arrested.

Imperial checkpoints were getting tighter everyday. Rumors of rebellion had filtered all the way down to the Junior Senate, and the newest propaganda posters proclaimed HE WHO HAS NOTHING TO HIDE HAS NOTHING TO FEAR. In other words, even diplomats got searched at checkpoints.

The day her father almost went to Dathomir, she woke up with her heart in her throat. She could _feel_ something different and wrong, a warning hovering in the air, never mind they were on a humanitarian visit to a farming colony. The feeling was as real as anything she saw with her eyes or heard with her ears, even if she couldn’t say where it came from. As they stepped toward the checkpoint, the buzzing grew to a clanging alarm, and she wasn’t surprised when her father squeezed her hand and whispered, “help me.” 

There was no time for questions. She stepped to the front of the line and flung her traveling case onto the inspection table with a wide grin.

“Never can be too careful!” she proclaimed, yanking out her panties and unfolding them one by one in front of a horrified guard.

“Really, Princess, this isn’t necessary,” he stammered, blushing and looking away. Her father caught her eye, offering a faint nod of approval, so she moved onto the bras, which weren’t as spectacular as she would’ve liked -- she was developing terribly slowly -- but the guard withdrew from them as if they were poisonous.

 _Yes, let us through_ , she thought as hard as she could. _Picture yourself on the news holo inspecting a princess’s underthings and wave us on._ She could feel his resolve breaking as she reached for a box of sanitary pads, and then the second guard arrived.

“Senator Organa, your case, please.” His voice was dry and businesslike, and he barely spared Leia and her panties a second glance. “How odd,” he murmured, bending low to inspect the briefcase her father carried to work each day. “It appears something is stuck behind the lining of your briefcase. A data chip perhaps?”

“Is that where the shopping list has gone? My wife will be most pleased you’ve found it,” her father replied. His smile was nonchalant, but Leia didn’t miss the tightness around his eyes.

Her heart thudded. The sun beat down on her face, and sweat trickled down her back. 

“Father, I don’t feel well,” she said loudly. “I think I’m going to --”

Both guards leaped backward as she bent over the table, pretending to heave. It was a dubious plan since she couldn’t actually vomit on command, so she changed strategies at the last minute and swayed on her feet before mustering her very best fake faint. Luckily, her cousin Lida had a flare for the dramatic and fainted all the time. Leia and Amilyn had spent _hours_ honing their imitation, until they were so good the palace guard summoned a medic and they’d both gotten in trouble. Now she let all her muscles go slack and plummeted straight into a farmer with a clucking flock of tip-yips.

Feathers exploded around her, and through a crack in her eyes, Leia saw the data chip vanish into her father’s sleeve.

When they finally reached their chambers, he flung his arms around her and said, “You did so well!” His voice was barely above a whisper, and when Leia drew back to ask a question, he shook his head and gestured toward the ‘fresher.

She followed him obediently and watched as he opened all the taps to their full volume. Only then did she speak.

“I want to join the rebellion.” The words came out in a rush. She’d been marshalling arguments since they’d left the checkpoint. Arguing against the suspension of habeas corpus in some fake children’s senate could never be enough for her, not when she knew there was real work to be done.

Her father held up a hand, silencing her verbal onslaught before it could start. “No argument necessary,” he said, looking sad and proud. “We need you.”

Leia stuck up her chin. “Then I’ll serve.”

***

The next weeks passed in a blur of training Leia hadn’t known existed. Her martial arts lessons doubled. She learned how to resist interrogation, how to hide encrypted messages around pins in her hair, and how to weave just enough truth into her lies to make them sound authentic.

She didn’t mean to stop talking to Amilyn, but it was difficult to figure out what to say when she couldn’t speak about the most important things in her life anymore. Amilyn moved onto someone else, and Leia fell in love with her work, but sometimes she still pulled out their old video messages when she needed to laugh.

***

The next time Leia saw Amilyn was her eighteenth birthday, and she thought she was hallucinating. That was because she’d injected herself with an entire syringe of scopolamine hydrobromide.

Amilyn’s hair was especially lovely, she thought as she reached up to finger the curls. They were vivid purple on top, fading to a deep maroon underneath, and they felt shockingly real.

“Leia Organa, I thought we had a rule,” the Amilyn hallucination said. “If you steal intoxicants, you have to share.” Then she flipped over the empty syringe with a frown. “Wait, are you injecting yourself with black market interrogation drugs?”

Leia didn’t answer, because she was certain you shouldn’t start a conversation with a hallucination, especially not during an interrogation. Not that she could really talk anyway -- her teeth were chattering, and her mouth had gone desperately dry. That must be an intentional side effect so they could make you give up your secrets for a glass of water. Good to know.

A blinking green light snapped her back to the fake Amilyn, who now had a comm link in her hand. She leaned over Leia, peering into her eyes, and said, “I’m getting help.”

Well. That was an unusually practical hallucination. 

“Stop,” Leia rasped. She swung wildly at the comm, and she must have connected because she heard it clatter to the floor. 

A warm hand clasped hers and Leia tried to say, _you’re really here,_ but all she managed was an incomprehensible gurgle. What kind of idiot made an interrogation drug that made it impossible to talk? Maybe they didn’t use the whole syringe all at once, supplied a very reasonable voice in the back of her mind. It had spoken up earlier, before she injected herself, but she hadn’t listened.

Amilyn scooped her comm link off the floor and stared at it uncertainly for a moment before she put it away. “What have you gotten us into, Leia? I hear nothing from you for two years, and now it’s all, ‘hold my hair back while I throw up these interrogation drugs.’”

“I didn’t ask you to hold back my hair,” Leia said, feeling a touch petulant. She’d braided it quite nicely before this whole ordeal, thank you very much. And anyway, she didn’t feel nauseated, just suddenly very, very hot.

“Temperature dysregulation is a side effect of scopolamine overdose,” Amilyn said. “Also extreme itching. It says here I might have to tie oven mitts on your hands.” 

“Thank you for not calling the doctor,” Leia managed. At least she wasn’t itching. Yet.

“What? And get you decommissioned from field work for having terrible judgment? I would never.” Amilyn pressed a hand to her chest in mock horror. Her lips twisted into a wry grin. “No, seriously, I would never. My judgment is questionable at best.”

Leia slumped against Amilyn’s side. “Amilyn, I’m sorry. I wish I’d known you were in the rebellion too. If I had…”

“You wouldn’t have quit talking to me?” Amilyn peered down at Leia, her gray eyes cloudy. 

Leia nodded even though the motion made her head swim. Amilyn looked away and sighed.

“Yeah, you sucked. It was the saddest thing that happened to me...when I was fifteen and I didn’t know anything about asymmetrical warfare.” She looked down at Leia and beamed. “You’re pretty fabulous, Leia Organa. Well, when you’re not full of black market drugs. But I got over you. I had sex with a lot of fighter pilots. Okay, two fighter pilots, but it’s a respectable start. And I stole a _lot_ of information because nobody thinks a scatterbrained junior senator could be a spy.” 

Leia was shivering violently now, and she didn’t protest when Amilyn wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

“Amilyn?” she asked through chattering teeth. “How did you get here?”

Amilyn blinked. “You pinged me.”

“I did?” The hour or so before Leia had injected herself was a blur, though she had a dim memory of seeing rainbow colored hair in the mess hall. She shook her head, trying to clear the drug-induced cobwebs. She’d wanted to call Amilyn for ages, but she never was good at apologies. Apparently, the prospect of dosing herself with interrogation drugs loosened her up. “I _did_ ping you,” she said, the memories finally coalescing. “And you came.”

“Of course I did. You’re fabulous, I’m fabulous...war is not fabulous. That’s no reason we can’t be friends.” She tugged Leia into the bed and slid in beside her, piling them both with the worn, utilitarian blankets the base had to offer. “I’m staying the night just in case you try to die of some weird side effect,” she declared. “And someday, when you’re completely sober and not disgusting, you owe me a real seduction.”

“It’s a deal,” Leia promised, tucking herself against Amilyn’s warmth. It was the first time she’d ever slept next to anyone, and she added the memory to the small collection of happy thoughts that kept her afloat through the darkest missions.

***

“Two pilots. Nice. Why choose when you can have both?”

Amilyn was the first person to greet Leia when she arrived on Hoth, fresh from evacuating Yavin. The _Falcon_ was the last ship in, and Leia was relieved there was no delegation waiting. Just Amilyn, leaning against the wall of the hangar bay, watching as Han and Luke disappeared around the corner. A solitary pink curl had escaped from under her hat, and it bobbed as she said, “If I liked dick, I might be jealous.”

Leia’s jaw opened and shut as she scanned the room, hoping no one overheard. “It’s not like that,” she snapped. 

Amilyn’s eyes were dancing. “Ooh, then tell me what it is like!”

Leia’s knees went weak, and all she managed was, “I was afraid you were dead.”

She hadn’t had much time to think since escaping from the Death Star, which was a blessing, because every memory of the past was a blow. It seemed as if everyone she’d ever known was gone. If they hadn’t died on Alderaan, they’d died storming Scarif or attacking the Death Star. After awhile, she’d just started assuming no one she loved had made it out alive. And then there was Amilyn, wild-haired and throwing out innuendos about Leia’s sex life, while everyone else was treating her as if she were made of glass.

Amilyn caught her, and now she was bending down to peer into Leia’s eyes. The bend was quite significant. Amilyn had grown a lot since they were kissing in the palace garden, that last summer before they became Rebel spies. 

Amilyn’s hand were warm on her back, and her hair was the first bright thing Leia had seen since Alderaan died. If she tilted her head, just a little -- 

But she couldn’t. The hangar bay went blurry behind a film of unshed tears, and her knees were buckling again, and this was no seduction. She choked out, “Don’t let me go.”

And of course, Amilyn didn’t.

***

Kes Dameron and Shara Bey got married the night before the assault on Endor, and Luke got drunk. Leia was sort of relieved to see it; he hadn’t been the same since they got back from Bespin, never mind that he’d successfully rescued Han and adjusted alright to the cybernetic hand.

“D’you have one that got away?” he asked, gesturing vaguely toward Shara. Or Kes. It was hard to tell. “You know, like if you’d both been single at the right time, it could’ve really worked out?”

Leia raised her eyebrows. She was about to ask when Luke _wasn’t_ single, but she got that weird nauseated feeling she always got when her thoughts came anywhere near Luke’s sex life.

She almost retorted how _everyone_ had gotten away, on account of all her childhood crushes being dead, but then she caught Amilyn’s eye across the room. Once upon a time, she used to feel sorry their epic teenage romance had been squashed beneath the wheels of the Empire; now she liked listening to Amilyn talk about her torrid affairs with pilots, most recently Evaan Verlaine. When Luke’s nostalgia was spent, she fought her way across the room to stand next to her oldest friend.

“Best friends forever?” Leia shouted over the din of the band. It was possible that Luke wasn’t the only one who’d had too much to drink.

Amilyn looked a little puzzled, so Leia leaned in closer and said, “You’re going to survive this war, and I don’t even know how many people I’ve already lost. So I need you to promise me right now, no matter what weird crazy bantha poodoo happens between now and the fall of the Empire, you’re going to be my friend.”

It was the most openly affectionate thing Leia had said to anyone since Alderaan exploded, and she had to grit her teeth not to blame it on the alcohol.

Amilyn’s smile was as radiant as she’d ever seen it. “Leia Organa, I thought you’d never ask! Of course, I’ll be your friend forever.” Then she winked. “And you still owe me a _real_ seduction.”

***

Hologram Amilyn didn’t seem concerned that Leia was lying on the kitchen floor.

“You know, if I had to bet on which one of us would accidentally get knocked up by a smuggler, I’d definitely put all my credits on me,” she announced.

“You’re gay,” Leia pointed out. If she kept her eyes firmly on the ceiling and didn’t move, the nausea almost went away.

“Well, yeah, but an accidental baby totally sounds like me,” Amilyn said, unfazed. “Remember when all your cousins were getting married, and you were complaining the palace was infested with babies? And now it’s you!”

“Kriff you,” Leia muttered. It was hot outside, the tiles were deliciously cool against her back. Han would be in here with her, she knew, if she were willing to admit that she was sick in the first place.

“My point is, you’re going to be good at this, Leia.” The hologram wobbled, but Amilyn’s voice stayed strong.

“How could you possibly know that?” Leia snapped.

“Because I know you!” Amilyn’s grin blossomed and her violet curls bounced. “And you’ll have backup. I will be an _excellent_ wacky aunt. I promise not to drop the baby! At least, not on his head.” 

“Very reassuring.”

Amilyn did not appear to register the sarcasm. “Hey, just in case you need to hear it: Bail Organa is your only father. So what if Darth Vader had a secret life as some kind of interplanetary baby daddy? That doesn’t make you his! You never let anyone else define you, so don’t start now.”

“Record that and send it to me?” she asked, hating herself a little for the weakness, but she really _did_ need to hear it -- most notably in the small hours of the night when Han was asleep and her pride wouldn’t let her wake him with her fears.

“You’ll have it in an hour,” Amilyn promised, and for a long time, Leia listened to the recording every night before bed.

***

Ben found that message when he was nineteen years old, and Leia’s life imploded.

***

Leia allowed herself precisely five minutes of weakness after the police left the house. They’d torn every room apart, looking for any trace of First Order propaganda Ben might have left behind before killing half of Luke’s disciplines and fleeing with the rest.

Her message light was flashing -- her real, personal number, and not just the one the media knew -- and she had one unopened recording from Amilyn Holdo. She decided to lay down on the living room floor, because that seemed like the sort of thing you were allowed to do if your whole life shattered all at once. Then she pressed play.

“So I’ve been looking all over the galaxy for a “sorry your son joined a human supremacist totalitarian regime” card, and there’s just not one, okay?” The recorded Amilyn winced. “My assistant told me not to say that, but I know you’d hang up if I called you with a platitude, and terribly inappropriate humor is the best that I could do. She’s glaring at me now -- my assistant, I mean -- and I think she might quit, which is a real tragedy because she’s the very last assistant willing to put up with my shenanigans. 

You’d love her. Her name’s Kaydel Co Connix, and you’re probably wondering why I’m talking about her so much -- but look, I know you’re going to start a rebellion, and you’ll need someone to manage logistics. She’s going to love you so much better than she loves me! Which isn’t hard. She only barely tolerates me -- but that’s not the point. The point is, I know you’re alone right now, and you _feel_ alone, even if you don’t want to admit it. So I’m offering you the best thing I know to give, which is tactical support for the upcoming revolution.

Just name the place, and I’m coming! With guns. And the best secretary you’ll ever have. Also all the credits in my bank account, which isn’t very many, but you can have them. The resistance can have them. I know you, Leia. You’re going to fight. And I’m going to fight at your side.”

Leia stretched out her hand, and a blaster rifle soared toward it. She pulled herself off the floor and typed just one word: D’Qar.

***

Poe Dameron told Leia to seduce Amilyn four weeks after Han’s funeral.

“How is this possibly your business?” she snapped, standing up from her desk and setting her jaw.

Poe just leaned back in his chair and waved her off. “Your intimidation tactics don’t work on me. That’s why you like me.”

“That’s not --”

She bit off the protest before she finished. No use arguing with the truth. She felt a little stupid, and a little grateful that Poe could make her feel that way. So long as at least one person could occasionally make her feel like an idiot, and she didn’t kill them, she figured she wasn’t a power mad dictator.

“Well, at least answer the question,” she said, settling back into her chair. She uncorked a bottle of, well, something. She hadn’t even looked at the label when she’d stuck it in her desk; she just knew she’d need it. And now was the time.

“It’s my business because I care about you,” Poe said, staring at her with alarming sincerity. His open affection made her uneasy, for reasons she didn’t care to examine closely.

“Shouldn’t I --” she fluttered her hands vaguely -- “wait a little longer?”

Poe leaned forward. “You know you can be sad someone died and still choose for yourself to be happy, right? Love is a terrible thing to waste.”

***

There was just one problem: Leia didn’t know how to seduce someone.

Rescuing Han from Jabba’s palace was an excellent seduction, if you cared to think of it that way. They’d certainly fallen straight into bed after that. But that strategy wouldn’t work with Amilyn, who was unlikely to become a crime lord’s wall hanging in the first place. Leia considered it one of her best qualities.

Leia certainly hadn’t been celibate in the years she and Han had been apart, but she hadn’t been intentional about sex either. It was a thing that happened in the heat of the moment, usually on a post-battle adrenaline high, and rarely repeated with the same person. Amilyn was different. She’d been a constant in Leia’s life for forty years. Whatever they did, she had to do it right.

It would have been easier if they didn’t live on a military base on the edge of the galaxy. She knew what to do with wine and candles -- but she only had hangar bay hooch and emergency flares that should not be deployed inside under any circumstances.

The sun was sinking behind the horizon when Leia realized that she was actually quite afraid, and that just pissed her off -- which was how she wound up marching out of her quarters with no clear idea what she’d do afterward.

She found Amilyn perched on top of a Y-wing, a soldering iron dangling from her hand and purple curls sticking out from behind a battered welding mask. The sight made her a little weak in the knees, but she kept her voice casual as she held up a bottle of hangar bay hooch and called, “Need a break?”

Amilyn tore off the mask and grinned. “Come on up! The view’s good!”

Leia climbed the ladder with the bottle in her hand. It was awkward, but nothing she hadn’t done before, albeit a long time ago. Amilyn patted a flattish bit of the nose cone, and they settled down together, reclining against the windscreen.

“I don’t have any glasses, I’m afraid,” Leia said, twisting the top off the heavy brown bottle. Some seduction attempt this was turning out to be.

“You’re afraid you don’t have glasses?” Amilyn shook her head. “This isn’t something you drink out of a glass, Princess. And we need a drinking game.”

Leia squeezed her eyes shut, just for a second. So she was terrible at seduction. It was healthy to be bad at something. Yes, she’d come up here intending to restart a forty-year-old love affair and she’d initiated drunken bacchanalia on top of a starfighter. What would Poe do? Well, _that_ was blindingly obvious, at least. _Go with it, General_ , he’d say, so that’s what she decided to do.

“Alright,” she said, doing her best to look unfazed. “I’m going to tell you something about yourself, and if it’s true, you drink. If I’m wrong, I drink.”

“I like it! Do me first!”

Leia leaned back against the windscreen, wondering how her fifteen-year-old self had ever been annoyed with Amilyn’s brightness. “You have no idea what your natural hair color is,” she said.

Amilyn blew a violet curl out of her face and took a drink. “Why would I want to know a thing like that?” She leaned back next to Leia, and their knees touched. Then she pointed an accusing finger. “You smoke.”

“I do not!”

“New rule! If you lie, you take two drinks.” She held up a finger when Leia started to speak. “You’re not getting out of this one! I _know_. You don’t smoke a lot, just when you think you _really_ deserve one. You probably have a little case of cigarras in your desk, and you have some kind of deal with yourself that they have to last so many days, and that’s how you make yourself feel less guilty about your bad habit.”

When Amilyn was animated -- which was often -- she gesticulated wildly, and her fingers brushed against Leia’s arm, and then the top of her thigh. It felt good. Not sexual, just comfortable, and Leia let herself scoot a little closer across the narrow space where they perched. 

“Caught,” she said, letting her knee knock against Amilyn’s on purpose. “How many drinks is that exactly?” 

“Well, I was right about the smoking, so that’s one. Then there’s the lying penalty, so that’s two. And if I caught you on the case in your desk, that’s three.” She nudged Leia’s ribs. “And if I’m right about your justification, I think that counts for two all by itself.”

Leia thought about protesting, then decided not to bother. Her fingers brushed against Amilyn’s as she took the bottle, and she tipped it up and swallowed till she couldn’t anymore. When she leaned back, she felt pleasantly dizzy, and her head had accidentally landed on Amilyn’s shoulder. She decided not to move.

“You weren’t kidding about the view,” she said. Their Y-wing was parked in front of the open hangar bay doors. The sunset had faded to a thin, amber strip on the horizon, and above it, stars were emerging from the blue velvet sky.

“You got a fact for me?” Amilyn was so close Leia could feel her breath on her ear and her curls brushing against the back of her head.

Very slowly, she tilted her face up. “When you were younger, you loved a girl, and if life hadn’t gotten in the way, the two of you might really have been something.”

“You owe me another drink.” Amilyn hand lingered against Leia’s as she passed over the bottle.

“Exactly where was I wrong?”

“Loved,” she said. “You shouldn’t have said it in the past tense.”

***

The last message from the _Raddus_ was a video transmission. It said:

“If you’re watching this message, I must be dead. Oops! Or possibly yay, if I went down successfully completing a mission. Hopefully something glamorous, of vital importance to the Resistance, etc. etc. Not, you know, getting shot in the back by a stray stormtrooper while picking up worthless intelligence from a dead drop. Or worse, choking to death on a ration bar alone in the mess hall because I couldn’t bother to get myself dinner before midnight.

So let’s embrace the optimistic scenario: I died in a blaze of glory while saving the whole damn Resistance. If that’s not what happened, could you just pretend like it was when you give my eulogy? Make it a good story. A _really_ good story. One for the history books, please.

And okay, I’m stalling. The Maker knows I’ve recorded enough of these just-in-case videos over the years. I don’t know why this one is so much harder than all the others. Maybe because you and I got started after we’d already said an uncountable number of goodbyes to people who should’ve outlived us -- you especially. You’ve got the most messed up past of anyone I’ve ever met, you know? So it seems unfair that you’d have to watch this goodbye video from me, because really, if you start something new when you’re this old, you ought to get to keep it, right? But you and I are not fairytale princesses who get happy endings. Well, no, that’s not true. The happy ending we’re fighting for is something so much bigger than our own tiny lives. 

Which doesn’t change the fact that I promised to outlive you, and I’m really sorry I failed. I figured I could be the one standing over a funeral pyre, stoic in my grief, secure in the knowledge that I got to fuck someone _really_ hot...and smart, and brave, and talented. But also hot. You made my teenage dreams come true, Leia Organa, and don’t you forget that. 

But you also made my grownup dreams come true. For a few shining months, I got the kind of relationship I thought didn’t exist in real life: adventure and an anchor all at once. We fought evil, we solved highly complex logistical problems, we laughed, and...okay, I don’t know how to finish this sentence. All the things we did together would require at least twelve hours of video, but I’ve only got six minutes before I have to lay siege to a First Order base, and I wasted at least two of them trying to find the most flattering camera angle. 

And, oh, that red light you see blinking in the background -- they’re calling me to the bridge. Better go fight evil now! Maybe the force be with you, because I know it was with me every day we were together.”


End file.
